The Devil’s Footprints

The Devil’s Footprints. This was one of my favourite earth mysteries in my youth, right on up there with ancient astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle. And even after the latest two had ceased to be all that mysterious to me, the Devil’s footprints soldiered on. And to this day in fact, the case has never been wholly explained.

OK, so what are the Devil’s Footprints? On the morning of February 9 1855 the residents of Devonshire in southern England woke to a fresh fallen snow. And in the snow there were tracks, mysterious U shaped tracks. Tracks that led through villages and across the countryside, over walls, over houses, across rivers, and even reportedly into and out of pipes with a diameter as small as four inches. And while there was some wandering, the tracks extended more than 100 miles. People were a little alarmed to say the least, and in Devon there were reports of a devil like creature being seen. This prompted people to arm themselves against the unknown maker of the tracks. The first day was the most extensive, though there are some reports that some tracks were seen here and there on a few subsequent days.

Much speculation followed in the newspapers about what had created the tracks. An escaped kangaroo was one popular theory, with the obvious caveat that it seems odd that a kangaroo could travel over 100 miles without being seen. Chains dangling from a drifting blimp was proposed, although that seems even more ridiculous than the kangaroo theory with a bit of thought. And yes, people ascribed the tracks to supernatural forces, this was an era when many people literally believed in the devil. And while there have been a few isolated similar cases, nothing nearly so extensive or widely reported upon is in the historical record. To this day it’s a mystery, recycled by modern alien believers ascribing the tracks to alien activity of some sort. One thing is clear though, it’s not a hoax, there’s no way one person or even a team of people could have made such an extensive network of tracks in just a few short hours in the middle of the night and not be seen, we are talking tracks that ran through towns and villages.

Frankly, I was baffled for decades by this case. Sadly, I don’t find it as baffling anymore. Since I first studied these sorts of things some decades back, I’ve learnt a lot. A lot about history, culture, human nature, psychology, and last but not least … logic. And the first thing we have to look at in a case like this, is the facts. And what do we have here? A bunch of nineteenth century newspaper reports. And that, my friends, is that. No one thought to write a book on it. No scientists wrote any papers on the topic. It was all pretty much dismissed as hysterical superstitious nonsense, and life went on. At this point, anyone who knows anything about the history of newspapers should be thinking, “Ub oh, nineteenth century newspapers are the primary source?” As the Jacko or cow in a UFO incident shows, anyone who takes old newspaper reports literally is taking a leap of faith.

However, since newspapers are all we have, what have we? Well, there’s a lot of letters to the editor about the Devil’s Footprints in those newspapers. In fact, lots of letters from first hand witnesses to the event. And there’s a fair number of very sober letters by reasonable sounding people who said they went outside when they heard the commotion, saw no more than the usual fresh animal tracks in the snow, and don’t understand what the commotion was about. And when we look at the tracks themselves, descriptions of which vary by the way, they are not dissimilar to all sorts of tracks made by a variety of creatures hopping and prancing about. In other words, a strong case can be made that this is simply a case of mass hysteria of some sort. And it almost goes without saying that the newspapers of the time certainly exaggerated what hysteria there was.

Something to keep in mind is that this was the first generation of a revolution in human communication. For the first time in history people across England were in real time communication with each other. Yes, telegraphy was exploding across the developed world, and by 1855 there were already news agencies operating via telegraph. So that morning when someone somewhere in this whole mess thought they saw strange tracks in the snow, within hours breathless reports were being sent along the wires, and the rest is history. Not to mention that people of that era moved around a lot more than most of us moderns would think, and news could indeed travel quickly. They had horses for God’s sake.

So can it be proved that the devil’s Footprints was a mild case of mass hysteria, exaggerated by newspapers of the time … and modern chroniclers searching for evidence of the trans-mundane? No. It does however strike me as being a perfectly reasonable and rational explanation for what we know of the phenomena.

My alternate theory is that it was some sort of hopping alien unmanned probe. It was small and moving very fast. May not even have been hopping, might have just been extending some sort of sensor downwards to take samples and maybe “ping” the Earth with any number of microwave or other radiation, while reading reflections from same. Even with what we know of the capabilities of robots, a lot of data could be gathered with a single one track probe like this. And as for its speed, if the aliens are actually robot intelligences, they may think at near light speed and perceive the world as very “slow,” so to them a probe that’s zipping along at hundreds of miles an hour is painfully slow. Prolly another good reason to avoid aliens. If they are robots, and they are hostile, they would think (and likely move) so much faster than us that there would be no contest.

(The above image is public domain under US copyright law and pretty much all copyright law since it dates from 1855. It’s not even known which newspaper it came from from what I can tell, since it’s been so copied and distributed in the 150 odd years since it was created. I grew up with snow, I know darn well how many mysterious animal tracks one finds all over the place in fresh fallen snow. Especially since wind and weather conditions can do all sorts of things to tracks.)

Welcome to Doug’s Darkworld

A blog about science, history, war, politics, current events, and just about anything that I find interesting. I post here once a week, this is primarily an archive of my older writings. My new blog is now on Patreon, join me there for more recent posts.

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